Week 11 Reflection

This week during my field experience, I found several uses of technology in the classroom. The teacher emails, takes role and lunch count, does research, uses programs in the classroom, and has the students take tests in the computer lab. The students spend two days a week in the computer labs with the goal of having one half hour of typing and one half hour learning new technology. The first thing Monday morning, the teacher had the students go into to computer lab and take a computerized test on planets. I had the opportunity to help a student by reading the questions and answers aloud to assist her in taking the test. One afternoon, the teacher used the Starry Night program to enhance the classroom discussion on constellations which was part of their current science curriculum. Through this technology, the students had a much better understanding of the way the constellations moved around the North star in the sky than if the teacher has tried to explain it.

During the week, I had the opportunity to speak with one of the computer technicians and gather some interesting information about the technology philosophy at the school. They students go to the computer labs twice a week for one half hour each. During one lab time, the students spend the time practicing typing. Once the students were finished with their typing drills, they were able to get on their email or play games. I found it interesting that each student has an email through the school. During the other lab time, the technician teaches the students different programs. It was interesting to me that next week the students are going to begin using Movie Maker to make digital stories. I asked the technician about this and she said she had recently been to a district training in which she was trained to use Movie Maker and now she now planned on teaching it to the students. This district has training for computer technicians four times a year.

I used a PowerPoint presentation I had created on the geography of Europe in my first lesson I gave to the class. My partner and I used a web quest we had found on the Middle Ages to introduce the student to people of medieval times. Our cooperating teacher told us a trick that she uses to facilitate getting the students to the right site. Through experience she had learned that it was easier to email the link to each of the students because inevitably the students have a problem typing in the link no matter how simple it is. The following day, that is exactly what we did and it was much easier for the students as they did not need to spend a great deal of time trying to get to the right site.

From my experiences in the classroom this week I found that the students were very skilled in their use of technology. I was impressed with the computer technician’s willingness to learn new technology and immediately expose the student to it as well. I thought it was really neat that all the students had email and could sent emails to their friends and that the teacher could use it to help facilitate learning. I am continuing to make additional lessons in which I will incorporate technology as I found the students are very sophisticated in their use of technology. It was very interesting to see the different ways technology is being used daily in the classroom.